Google says self-driving car tests now focused on city driving

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc said it has begun testing
its self-driving cars on city streets, a crucial new phase in its
quest to eventually make the technology a standard feature in
automobiles.

After several years of testing self-driving cars on freeways,
where driving conditions are more predictable, Google in the past
year shifted its focus to city street driving, the company said
in a post on its official blog on Monday.

Google said it has driven thousands of miles on the streets of
Mountain View, California, a small suburban community where the
company maintains its headquarters roughly 35 miles South of San
Francisco. Google's driverless cars rely on video cameras, radar
sensors, lasers and a database of information collected from
manually driven cars to help navigation, according to the
company.

"A mile of city driving is much more complex than a mile of
freeway driving, with hundreds of different objects moving
according to different rules of the road in a small area," wrote
Chris Urmson, the director of Google's self-driving car project
in the blog post on Monday.

"We've improved our software so it can detect hundreds of
distinct objects simultaneously - pedestrians, buses, a stop sign
held up by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that
indicate a possible turn," Urmson said.